“You seem to understand one’s feelings,” said Razumov steadily.  “It was trying.  It was horrible; it was an atrocious day.  It was not the last.”

“Yes, I understand.  Afterwards, when you heard they had got him.  Don’t I know how one feels after losing a comrade in the good fight?  One’s ashamed of being left.  And I can remember so many.  Never mind.  They shall be avenged before long.  And what is death?  At any rate, it is not a shameful thing like some kinds of life.”

Razumov felt something stir in his breast, a sort of feeble and unpleasant tremor.

“Some kinds of life?” he repeated, looking at her searchingly.

“The subservient, submissive life.  Life?  No!  Vegetation on the filthy heap of iniquity which the world is.  Life, Razumov, not to be vile must be a revolt—­a pitiless protest—­all the time.”

She calmed down, the gleam of suffused tears in her eyes dried out instantly by the heat of her passion, and it was in her capable, businesslike manner that she went on—­

“You understand me, Razumov.  You are not an enthusiast, but there is an immense force of revolt in you.  I felt it from the first, directly I set my eyes on you—­you remember—­in Zurich.  Oh!  You are full of bitter revolt.  That is good.  Indignation flags sometimes, revenge itself may become a weariness, but that uncompromising sense of necessity and justice which armed your and Haldin’s hands to strike down that fanatical brute...for it was that—­nothing but that!  I have been thinking it out.  It could have been nothing else but that.”

Razumov made a slight bow, the irony of which was concealed by an almost sinister immobility of feature.

“I can’t speak for the dead.  As for myself, I can assure you that my conduct was dictated by necessity and by the sense of—­well—­retributive justice.”

“Good, that,” he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes.  As if anything could be changed!  In this world of men nothing can be changed—­neither happiness nor misery.  They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives—­a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers.  Those thoughts darted through Razumov’s head while he stood facing the old revolutionary hand, the respected, trusted, and influential Sophia Antonovna, whose word had such a weight in the “active” section of every party.  She was much more representative than the great Peter Ivanovitch.  Stripped of rhetoric, mysticism, and theories, she was the true spirit of destructive revolution.  And she was the personal adversary he had to meet.  It gave him a feeling of triumphant pleasure to deceive her out of her own mouth.  The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his mind.  Of that cynical theory this was a very subtle and a very scornful application, flouting in its own words the very spirit of ruthless revolution, embodied in that woman with her white hair and black eyebrows, like slightly sinuous lines of Indian ink, drawn together by the perpendicular folds of a thoughtful frown.